Gadzooks – pushing camera sensors to their limit!
News just in from dpreview.com:
Sensor manufacturer OmniVisionhas created what has now been confirmedas the smallest commercially-available image sensor in the world by Guinness World Record.
The OmniVision OV6948is an ultra-compact 1/36-inch backside-illuminated sensor that measures just 0.575mm x 0.575mm. The sensor, designed specifically for medical applications, features a resolution of 200 x 200 pixels, a 120-degree field of view, a 30 fps framerate and 1.75 µm pixels.
For Mathematicians, this new sensor needs to be seen against a known object (such as this finger-tip) in order to see its scale. Scale is a great topic in Mathematics as it has such practical applications in architecture and engineering, etc. In math, the ‘scale’ is a word we use to show the relationship between a measurement on a model and the corresponding measurement on the actual object. Without scales, maps and blueprints would be pretty useless. For example, on a house plan the scale might be 1:100. This means that a measurement of 1 inch on the drawing will be 100 inches in reality. There was a joke about the scale used on maps during World War II. An officer was captured but he had no maps with him, so his captors asked, “Where are your maps?” The officer replied, “We used to use maps on a scale of 1:50 but they did not show enough detail on the landscape, so we tried maps on a scale of 1:20. They were much better. We also tried using maps on a scale of 1:10 but they were too large and, when we got maps on a scale of 1:1 they covered the whole landscape. So, now we use the landscape as its own map and it does suit us rather well!” Sometimes, scales can be a real pain, as on this continuum: